— Reasons to Stay Alive —
Matt Haig


I WENT BACK to visit my parents in Newark about a month ago. They don’t live in the same house, but the street they are on is parallel to the street where we used to live. It is a five-minute walk.


The corner shop is still there. I walked there on my own and bought a newspaper and could happily wait for the shopkeeper to give me my change. The houses I passed were the same orange brick houses. Nothing much had changed. Nothing makes you feel smaller, more trivial, than such a vast transformation inside your own mind while the world carries on, oblivious. Yet nothing is more freeing. To accept your smallness in the world.





  1. Appreciate happiness when it is there.
  2. Sip, don’t gulp.
  3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more.
  4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics.
  5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers.
  6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. ‘Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.’
  7. Listen more than you talk.
  8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.
  9. Be aware that you are breathing.
10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga.
13. Shower before noon.
14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.
15. Be kind.
16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing, and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.
18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like the Snow Queen in Frozen.
19. Don’t worry about things that probably won’t happen.
20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.)
21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and ‘walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet’.
22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.
23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it’s hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.
24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.
25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.
26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.
27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’
28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.
29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
30. Jules Verne wrote of the ‘Living Infinite’. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a ‘sea’. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive.
31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.
32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects.
33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or up and down. At your lowest and at your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.
34. Don’t worry about the time you lose to despair. The time you will have afterwards has just doubled its value.
35. Be transparent to yourself. Make a greenhouse for your mind. Observe.
36. Read Emily Dickinson. Read Graham Greene. Read Italo Calvino. Read Maya Angelou. Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.
37. If the sun is shining, and you can be outside, be outside.
38. Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.
39. Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.
40. Be brave. Be strong. Breathe, and keep going. You will thank yourself later.



SUNRISES, SUNSETS, THE thousand suns and worlds that aren’t ours but shine in the night sky. Books. Cold beer. Fresh air. Dogs. Horses. Yellowing paperbacks. Skin against skin at one in the morning. Long, deep, meaningful kisses. Short, shallow, polite kisses. (All kisses.) Cold swimming pools. Oceans. Seas. Rivers. Lakes. Fjords. Ponds. Puddles. Roaring fires. Pub meals. Sitting outside and eating olives. The lights fading in the cinema, with a bucket of warm popcorn in your lap. Music. Love. Unabashed emotion. Rock pools. Swimming pools. Peanut butter sandwiches. The scent of pine on a warm evening in Italy. Drinking water after a long run. Getting the all-clear after a health scare. Getting the phone call. Will Ferrell in Elf. Talking to the person who knows me best. Pigeon pose. Picnics. Boat rides. Watching my son being born. Catching my daughter in the water during her first three seconds. Reading The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and doing the tiger’s voice. Talking politics with my parents. Roman Holiday (and a Roman holiday). Talking Heads. Talking online about depression for the first time, and getting a good response. Kanye West’s first album (I know, I know). Country music (country music!). The Beach Boys. Watching old soul singers on YouTube. Lists. Sitting on a bench in the park on a sunny day. Meeting writers I love. Foreign roads. Rum cocktails. Jumping up and down (they’re publishing my book, they’re publishing my book, Jesus Christ, they’re publishing my book). Watching every Hitchcock movie. Cities twinkling at night as you drive past them, as if they are fallen constellations of stars. Laughing. Yes. Laughing so hard it hurts. Laughing as you bend forward and as your abdomen actually starts to hurt from so much pleasure, so much release, and then as you sit back and audibly groan and inhale deeply, staring at the person next to you, mopping up the joy. Reading a new Geoff Dyer book. Reading an old Graham Greene book. Running down hills. Christmas trees. Painting the walls of a new house. White wine. Dancing at three in the morning. Vanilla fudge. Wasabi peas. My children’s terrible jokes. Watching geese and goslings on the river. Reaching an age – thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine – I never thought I’d reach. Talking to friends. Talking to strangers. Talking to you. Writing this book.


Thank you.


A note, and some acknowledgements


Willie Nelson once said that sometimes you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.


And I have felt the need to write this book for a long time. But I have also been worried about writing it because it is obviously quite personal and I worried that writing it would make me relive some of those bad times. So for a long time I have been writing about it indirectly, in fiction.


Two years ago I wrote a book called The Humans (‹ link). It was in that novel, more than in any of my others, in which I addressed my own breakdown. The story was technically traditional science fiction – an alien arrives on Earth in human form and slowly changes his view of humanity – but I was really writing about the alienation of depression and how you get over that and how you can end up loving the world again.



In a note in the end of that book, the equivalent of right here, I publically ‘came out’ and talked very briefly of my own experience of panic disorder and depression. Just that little bit of openness met with a warm response, and I realised I’d been worrying over nothing. Rather than make me feel like a weirdo, being open had made me realise how many people suffer similar experiences at some time or other. Just as none of us are 100% physically healthy no one is 100% mentally healthy. We are all on a scale.


I then had the confidence to write a bit more about my experience online. But I still didn’t know if I would ever write this book. The person who told me to was the great Cathy Rentzenbrink. Cathy is one of the most dynamic and, frankly, brilliant advocates of books, championing their cause and – in this case – causing them to exist. She was the person, who, over some Wasabi-flavoured popcorn at a branch of Itsu, told me to write a book about depression. So, here it is, Cathy. Hope you like it.


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